Calendar.help – the easy way to schedule meetings

What is Calendar.Help?

Calendar.help is a new service in preview from Microsoft that makes scheduling meeting simple by using Microsoft’s ‘digital assistant’ Cortana. This project started in August, when Microsoft acquired Genee, an AI scheduling tool, and combined this with Cortana and their AI investment to create Calendar.help.

Currently in Preview

At this stage, Calendar.help (the project codename) is only at beta stage and only accessible by signing up to a preview. It is still very early days for this service – with no official name, release dates or confirmation on plans and/or pricing.

How it works

When you want to schedule a meeting with someone you simply need to cc Cortana into the email.

After this is sent Cortana takes care of all the communications back and forth until a suitable time has been agreed and then sends out the meeting invite on your behalf.

This is done through AI and conversation computing, allowing the communications between Cortana and your meeting attendees to remain human and your instructions to be given in natural language. For example: “Let’s catch up next week for 30 minutes”.

Once confirmed, you don’t even need to worry about sending the meeting invite, as Cortana sends this out for you.

Sign up to the preview

You can request to join the Preview and will be added to a waiting list until you receive an invitation code. You will need to use an email address with an Outlook or Google Calendar. To sign up, enter your email address here: https://calendar.help

FAQs

Q. What calendars does calendar.help work with?A. Calendar.help works with Office 365, Outlook.com and Google calendar.

Q. When will this be generally available?A. No dates are known yet, or how this service will be available – there isn’t even an official name yet, so this is very early days.

Q. How will calendar.help be priced or licensed?A. We don’t know how users will be able to access calendar.help or how much it will cost (if anything).